Tags

28-08-2013

ARA News

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned the United States on Monday, saying Washington will have to deal with another Vietnam scenario if it chooses to militarily intervene in the conflict-ravaged country after allegations that his regime has used chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb attack last week.

“Failure awaits the United States as in all previous wars it has unleashed, starting with Vietnam and up to the present day,” Reuters quoted Assad as saying in an interview published in a Russian newspaper on Monday.

While denying that the Syrian forces have used chemical weapons in Ghouta where hundreds of civilians were reportedly killed, he said Washington will be defeated if it intervened in his country.

“Would any state use chemicals or any other weapons of mass destruction in a place where its own forces are concentrated? That would go against elementary logic,” he told the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

Russia, Assad’s most powerful international ally and main arms supplier, said that rebels may have been behind the chemical attack and not the Syrian regime.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said any intervention in Syria without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be a grave violation of international law.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said it would still be possible to respond to a chemical weapons attack without the U.N. Security Council’s permission. China and Russia most likely would veto the Security Council’s vote.